Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops.

It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

Writing content, is not that difficult itself, it's the SEO techniques and how to adapt them to your content that is the hard part. It can be very tricky to write good SEO content that is both understood by the search engines and humans at the same time. However, the ground role for creating good SEO content is to write your content for human eyes first and then do your SEO. If you try to write good content, you will soon see that both the search engines and your visitors appreciate it.

Before you start writing your killer SEO content, you must have a subject to write about. Maybe, you already know much of something that interests you a lot, then write about that. If you are uncertain of what, in particular, you should write about, you can start by doing a search on the net. Then you will find out what your competitors write about, and how they present their content. This should give you many ideas on how to proceed with your own content. The point here is not to copy your competitors content or ideas! Instead, you should use it for inspiration and try to make a unique approach to the subject.

The best SEO technique, is to be unique. No search engine or human would be interested in content that they have already seen. Would you?! No, didn't think so. Look at SEO like a game of poker, the difference is, in SEO you have the chance of seeing your opponents cards and act on that. So use your competitors sites and content to your own advantage. Do and write something that they haven't. Be creative and dare to try new approaches, be as different and unique as you can. That is the key to successful SEO in the long run and do not copy others works!

One tip is to look into the future, what will people search for, the next year? Will there be some major breakthroughs, within your subject? If there is, try to plan and create content around that.

When you start writing your content, you must do some basic research on the subject you have chosen. Analyze your subject, find relevant keywords that you think are closely associated with it. Also, what keywords or phrase would your target visitors most likely use in a search, to find your subject? When you have analyzed your subject, you would have come up with a list of relevant keywords, that you can use to build your content around.

One way to use your keywords, is to write your text in blocks, where each block represent a set of keywords. In the beginning of your text, you use the main keywords for your subject, in next block of text you use the secondary set of keywords, and so on. However, don't overuse the use of your keywords, try to found a natural balance. If you overuse them, you can get penalized for keyword stuffing.

For every block of text in your article, you should have a title, with a keyword inside it. For you first paragraph, you can use the tag, for your sub blocks, use the tags. However, be sure to include your keywords in a natural way. Today's search engines are very good in spotting text that it's not written for humans. So avoid text like this, 'This KEYWORD boat on KEYWORD was closely to KEYWORD would be KEYWORD' etc. By doing that you will just get penalized or even worse, banned, from many search engines. If you use images on your page, take advantage of the ALT tag, and try to sneak in a pair of keywords there. Plus, you could name the image file itself, to a keyword, like 'keyword.gif', also.

Again, don't overuse your main keywords, instead use the list of keywords, that we talked about in the beginning, and be sure to use them all. The idea is to help the search engines to understand what your content is all about, without crossing the border. It takes a lot of practice, and you will most likely do mistakes in the beginning. However, don't let the mistakes, bring you down. Instead, learn from them and think of them as something positive. Remember, if you don't do any mistakes, you will not learn or discover anything new either.

Don't mix too much different subjects in the same text. The rule is to use one page for each topic. That way, you will not risk to bore your visitors, with long chunks of text, also some search engines doesn't index the whole page if it's too big. However, if your subject is very large, then split your article into several pages. If you have many pages, the chances of getting hits from the search engines, will increase.

You should know that the subject of long versus many short pages, are subjected for debate by many webmasters. Nevertheless, for me, I get better results from many short pages, compared with one big page. The best way to find out what suits you, is by trial and error. Put up some big one pages and some short pages, and track their performance, and then stick to the one that gives you the best result.

At last, the best way to learn writing good SEO content is to practice, a lot. You will surely feel frustrated and some major mistakes, sometimes, but remember, though it can take sometime, the reward for those who stick to it, is huge. So, my best advice is, be patience, write unique and fresh content on a daily basis and soon enough you will see the results.

Arthor : by K A Bergman

Typical search engines crawl and index the many, many pages of the Internet. If you search using one or two search terms like what most searchers do, you will get quite a number of page results. Most of these results are not the ones you are really looking for. It is not unusual that the search engine will treat your search terms differently than what you intend it to be.

For instance, a simple search for the word bow will give you results as shown below:

* bow - a weapon
* bow - a toolkit for statistical modeling
* bow - involves movement of the head

Searching this way can be time-consuming and a bit frustrating, especially if you don't know any sophisticated search techniques to get a more targeted result for your searches. This is where specialty search engines come in handy. Specialty search engines are more focused on a specific subject or topic thus they will give you more relevant results. In the above example, someone who wants to know more about it as it relates to sports can easily search for bow by using a sports search engine.

Specialty search engines are also known as topical search engines, vertical search engines or vortals. Specialty search engines focus on a specific topic like business or medical research, a geographic location, a target audience, or a specific file format like pdf files. Unlike general search engines, they search from only a few specific sites thus they often offer greater depth of coverage for a category that makes results narrower and more relevant.

Other specialty search engines also operate like directories where a human editor who is an expert in the subject reviews submitted sites before they got listed. This means that search results from specialty search engines are often of higher quality and more reliable than what you get from general search engines.

Specialty search engines can also help find the invisible web. Invisible web refers to the vast repository of information like databases that search engines and directories cannot retrieve. Not everything on the Web is visible because of technical barriers of search engine crawlers and the site owner's deliberate choice of excluding his web pages from the search engines. The invisible web offers a gold mine of information that every web searcher do not want to miss.

Author by : Arlene Cuares